“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“She’s probably hungry.”

“It’s like having a pet,” Joel said.

I went to the pantry. I selected cans from the back of the shelf, carefully considering what I could take that my mother wouldn’t miss. I grabbed a couple cans of Van de Kamp’s pork and beans, a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, and a can of string beans. We had an old army cooking pan in the clubhouse and I figured she could heat things over the kerosene lamp. I cut two thick pieces of my mother’s homemade bread, and put it all in a brown grocery sack along with a can opener, a fork, a spoon, a plate, and a bowl. Then I retrieved my schoolbag and went out back. As I neared the clubhouse, I could smell something bad. When I opened the door the smell intensified. The light and nightlite was off. “Grace?”

She didn’t answer but I could hear her lightly snoring. I thought it was a little strange that she was napping this late in the afternoon. I set the paper sack inside the door, along with the things from her locker, then rode my bike to work.

CHAPTER Nine

Hawaii is the most isolated place with a big population
on the face of the earth. It even has its own time zone.
I think that’s how I feel back here.

GRACE’S DIARY

Monday at the Queen was the slowest day of the week, but that didn’t mean we had less work. Mr. Dick created what we called the Monday death list. I think he put things on there for us to do just so he wouldn’t feel like we were wasting his money, like putting all the paper money in the cash register president’s head up and facing in the same direction or changing the words on the sign up front.

The worst job was changing the oil in the fryer. Fortunately we didn’t do it often. “Grease costs money,” Mr. Dick always said, so we only changed it once a week. He would have held out longer, but after seven days of using the same grease everything we dropped into the fryer started tasting the same, be it French fries, corn dogs, or burritos.

I was alone in the back, rolling burritos and stacking them in a plastic container when Dean came back.

Dean was a master of avoiding work. In fact he was a genius at it. I think that if he worked half as hard at working as he did avoiding it, he would have had a perennial lock on Employee of the Month.